Pinball Shuffle Beta

We've almost completed our second pinball table, and would love any feedback on it before we submit to Apple for the Mac and iOS. The final version is almost complete, we're just finishing a few missing assets and testing now. This table feels so much better and more polished than the first table, we've learned so much over the past few months with Pinball Massacre.

Thanks in advance for any advice and feedback. Any comments along with a request will get you a serial number PMed for the full game.

Couple suggestions:
* Make it clearer which button to hit to start the game. The keymap at the beginning is helpful, but for the first time playing the game, how about showing "Push Down to plunge." I've played lots of pinball games, and this one had me flummoxed how to start... I had to escape and start over to see the map again.
* Only let the window be scaled proportionally - the artwork is too good to be warped like that!
* The big guy walking around on top of the table is a fun idea! However, he really doesn't "pop" off the table - I didn't notice him until the ball actually hit him. I think this is because the camera is moving around a lot. Are there multiple camera modes?
* Why can't I launch the ball with different intensities? I need to just hold down back for a very long time before the ball launches into play... if it's going to be a fixed launch speed each time, don't make me hold down so long.
* Fun music in the game. However, it just fades out, waits about 15 seconds, then fades in to the next song. Could you do some kind of cross-fading (should be easy), or even beat matching (much more difficult)? Make it be like a DJ is overseeing all the music live - it would really keep the energy going in the game!
* The hole for the ball seems pretty darn big... to the point that a lot of balls kept falling without being hittable. Should that space be shrunk ever so slightly? Perhaps longer paddles?
* The gunshot sound seems out of place. Could a less jarring sound be used instead?
* When the game is "Resuming in 3... 2..." after a pause, I can press left/right for the paddles and it makes the noise, but nothing moves onscreen. No sound should be played. Same with the initial shareware time limit nag screen before a game starts.

* I never played your last board, so maybe this was to be expected, but your table just blew my mind... nice job! Specifically the flip... wow! It seemed like I could tap the right flipper while it was flipping, but not the left... I'm guessing you want those to behave consistently. I will try to duplicate the behavior to see if it's truly doing that.

* I can shake the ball up towards the paddle from behind the flipper, while it's falling to its doom in the middle. That seems... weird. It should be able to hit the back of the flipper.

* The colors look great, but the ball seems to get lost in the amalgam of color. This kind of goes along with the guy walking around. I wonder if a shadow under him, and near the ball, would help offset it from the background and make it pop out to the player a little more.

* I'm playing with the right arrow key and the left Shift. Not sure if you can do anything about it, but when I press right arrow, it stops the left shift from working.

* Getting the ball into the movie reel was a little confusing - didn't realize I had to shoot the gun again. Not a very big deal, but something I noticed.

I gave a lot of feedback, but that's only because otherwise, this game is a blast to play - great job!

Wow thanks for all the feedback Karl! I wrote down everything there to go and change, it's very helpful to have a fresh eye look at it because after playing so long I miss some of the obvious stuff. Some of those are bugs, some are by design (and can be tweaked/changed), and some you may just have to live with (arrow/shift key together).

How are your apps doing on the iOS store, still selling? Any plans for Mac App Store versions?

- On my ridiculously ancient machine (GMA 950) it plays at 23fps with shadows & reflections off. Not ideal but playable nonetheless. Changing the window size didn't seem to affect fps.
- With shadows & reflections on, the displayed fps showed 19, but it felt like 10 fps tops (not very playable)
- Definitely make the graphics scale proportionally when resizing the window
- While starting up, the window title says "Pinball Massacre", it switches to Pinball Shuffle once the movie starts
- The cyan (light blue? turquoise?) bumpers look a bit out of place in that color. Have you played with alternative color schemes? Perhaps making them violet/magenta to match the anime girl's outfit?
- The orange inverted-piramids also look a bit out of place, have you tried perhaps making them both more saturated and semi-transparent? How about having them rotate in place instead of (or in addition to) moving up and down?
- The floating green scores/points that float off the table are a bit hard to see when they are over the green part of the table, perhaps you could add an outline to the numbers?
- The plunger mechanic is a bit odd, I keep expecting being able to let it go when it is halfway down to shoot the ball at a slower speed but that doesn't seem to be allowed
- The rotating table is awesome

- Ouch, 23fps! The game really shines at 60, I hated playing it at 35-45fps before optimization on the iPhone 3GS. It's so much easier on iOS to enable/disable things based on the device generation, I wish Macs had a graphics rating that could be polled that gave a very rough performance estimate
- Window resizing is limited, and I'll make it switch to Pinball Shuffle earlier
- Bumpers are recycled from the first table, I'll talk to the artists about switching the colors
- Good idea on the arrows. I actually prefer the arrows from the first table, not sure why we switched
- Good idea on the floating scores
- Gun loads quicker now so hopefully that is less of an issue.
- I'm glad you like the rotation, I think it looks great. The two artists/table designers keep coming up with cool ideas. At first I complain because I have to program it, then I eventually love it